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Cream of Lima Bean Soup
Soak one cup of dried beans over night, in the morning drain and add three pints of cold water. Cook till soft and rub through a sieve. Cut two slices of onion and four slices of carrot in cubes and cook five minutes in two tablespoons of butter. Remove the vegetables, add two tablespoons of flour, one teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper, stir into the boiling soup. Just before straining into the tureen add one cup of cream.
A straightforward purée soup in the Boston-school manner: dried beans cooked down, sieved, and bound with a butter-and-flour roux flavoured by vegetables that are then discarded. A few points of period shorthand are worth translating.
- The beansOne cup of dried baby limas swells to roughly three cups cooked and yields about 1 1/2 quarts of finished soup, serving four to six. Large limas work but take longer and give a mealier purée.
- Three pints of waterSix cups. Expect to lose a cup or more to evaporation over the 45 to 75 minutes the beans need; top up if the pan threatens to go dry, since scorched bean purée cannot be rescued.
- Rubbing through a sieveThe recipe assumes this is done by hand, pressing the softened beans through a sieve. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve gets you there faster, and the sieving still matters — it catches the skins, which are what make an unstrained lima soup coarse.
- The onion and carrotThey are flavouring for the butter only and are lifted out before the flour goes in. Five minutes over moderate heat should soften them without browning; colour here will tint an otherwise pale soup.
- Cooking out the rouxThe instruction to stir the flour mixture into the boiling soup works, but give the flour a minute in the butter first and add the hot purée gradually. Flour dumped into boiling liquid lumps.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of pepper is a generous hand by current taste. The recipe specifies only "pepper"; white pepper is the usual modern choice in a pale soup. Season to your own preference.
- The creamThe recipe adds it last, just before serving, which is the moment to take the pan off the boil. Heavy or light cream both work; once the cream is in, reheat gently, because a floury cream soup brought back to a hard boil will separate and catch on the pan bottom.
- Straining into the tureenA final pass through a fine strainer as you serve, which catches anything the first sieving missed. Skipping it leaves a soup that is perfectly good but visibly homemade.
Cream soups of this kind — a vegetable purée thickened with a roux and finished with cream — were a staple of the American cooking-school tradition in the late nineteenth century, and household manuals of this period tend to repeat the same formula across a range of vegetables with only the purée changed. Lima beans, generally said to take their name from Lima, Peru, and long grown in the Americas before they reached New England kitchens, dried well and kept through the winter, which is one reason a soup section of this period leans on dried legumes. Infusing butter with onion and carrot and then discarding the solids reflects the French-influenced technique taught to American housekeepers, and the direction to add cream "just before straining into the tureen" is a reminder that this was food meant to arrive at the table in a serving vessel, not ladled from the stove.